In Search of Lost Time is a collaboration between Lynn Dennison, an artist working across several disciplines including still and moving image, Tom Miller, Wellcome-funded clinician scientist, whose clinical work centres on autoimmune encephalitis especially where it interacts with problems of memory and thinking, and his patients recovering from LGI1-limbic encephalitis. These patients suffer from inflammation to the part of their brain most important for autobiographical memories: the hippocampus. Many of us enjoy reliving these types of memory as they bring back a sense of familiarity and belonging, and often happy emotions. Patients suffer from being unable to re-experience these memories, losing their own place within a shared narrative and experience. This loss of the ability to re-experience their autobiographical memories is difficult to describe, even to family members, and is not clearly visible or easily understood. The aim of the project was to give patients the voice to describe what their internal experience of memory loss is like, using story-telling, still, and moving image, to capture, in a meaningful way, the first-person experience of having memory loss.
Through conversation, visiting specific sites important to our participants, and making images and video from these experiences, we developed material that might help to access memories or emotion.